Processing RAW locally, moving finished product to Network

[InfiniteBlue]

Please bear with me, I'm a bit of a newbie at Lightroom.

I'm looking at redoing my RAW workflow in Lightroom. It's become clear that working off my network drive is not the speediest solution, even with a gigabit ethernet connection between my desktop and my fileserver.

What I'm looking to do is to set up the following workflow:

1. Import RAW from my memory card to a local disk.
2. Perform all culling, developing, etc locally.
3. When satisfied, move the RAW and any metadata (XMP) to my network drive, clearing out the local copy.
4. Network drive gets backed up on a regular basis as normal.

Has anyone set up this kind of workflow in LR?

Thanks,
Jeremy

 

[Replytoken]

Welcome Jeremy,

Network drives and LR tend not to play well together. You might consider a working drive, and a primary storage drive. You could use the working drive as desired, and then export your catalog to a primary catalog on the primary drive. This would allow you to have the benefit of a primary catalog for searching and organizing purposes. Of course you should also back up the image files and the LR catalogs, but you have already accounted for this in Step #4 above.

--Ken

 

[Mark Sirota]

My workflow is similar to what you describe, except that I don't write out XMP.

I import to my local disk. This is automatically copied by a hand-written backup process to two identical external drives.

When I'm finished working with the local copy, I just delete it from the local disk and point Lightroom to the copy on the primary external drive.

Once you're "satisfied", do you still need the external XMP data? If not, then you're all set. If so, you'll need to devise a way to copy that to the networked drive before deleting the local copy.

 

[InfiniteBlue]

Well, it seems you can move files within Lightroom itself by dragging onto folders, which solves half the problem. I'd really like to drag the file into a root folder in the list and have lightroom re-create the folder structure from the root locally to the RAW file.

ie: if I have a file that's in d:\Photos\2''9\12\'3, I'd like to drop it in Y:\Photos\2''9\12\'3 by dragging the image onto Y:\Photos on the Folder list rather than having to have every single destination folder listed in my folders list.

As for XMP data, I don't really need it, I just thought that was how most RAW programs stored their settings. As I've discovered though, that information is stored in the catalog's database.